I chose to read The Christmas Tree Farm by Laurie Gilmore based on the success of the author’s earlier novel, The Pumpkin Spice Café. Although I had not read that particular novel, I was aware of Gilmore and decided to give her Christmas novel a chance. After broadening my scope of Christmas reads a few years ago from the romance genre to include mysteries as well as murder mysteries, I was not prepared for all the sex in The Christmas Tree Farm. I should have known what I was in for from the very beginning, where the author wrote on the opening pages “For anyone who ever wished Hallmark Christmas movies were steamier, this one might do the trick.”. For the first half of the novel the action is as pure as milk, yet the two main characters Kira and Bennett get up to all sorts of doing the nasty throughout the second half. I did not find all the sex appealing reading. I am well aware that I am not among Gilmore’s target audience (read: heterosexual women) yet I suppose I could do without reading about sexual intercourse, cunnilingus, fellatio and having fun with sex toys when I’d rather read about Kira’s Christmas tree farm, as it was the title which attracted me to the book in the first place.
Kira North is a female Scrooge who hates people as much as she hates Christmas. She has just bought a Christmas tree farm sight unseen, under the deluded notion that she could fix it up to live in some sort of rustic fantasy. Bennett Ellis is visiting his sister and has been roped in as a neutral party to find out more about the mysterious loner woman who bought the farm, especially to explore the rumour that there might be a dead body buried on the property by its previous owner. Bennett visits Kira, who does everything she can to make him know that he is unwelcome. While other men would be repulsed by this behaviour, Bennett is intrigued and only wants to find out more about this Grinch.
Gilmore took a page out of the Macomber manual by making her leading women fall for the bad boys, the men who women should stay away from. Thus when Kira meets Bennett, she is torn, as he is clearly not her type:
“Never in her entire life had Kira been attracted to a well-adjusted man–or attracted one, for that matter. Instead, she picked up delinquents, deviants, and general trouble wherever she went. Men that looked and acted like Bennett Ellis had never factored into the equation.”
Over the brief period of the Christmas season Bennett manages to bring Kira out of her grumpy solitude and into the activities of the small town. All of a sudden she changes from Ms Get Out Of My Face to a woman who can’t get enough of book clubs and Christmas concerts. I didn’t buy her rapid about-face any more than I bought Bennett’s attraction to her. Kira is really one of the rudest woman I have ever encountered in fiction and how any man would be drawn to such discourtesy–and keep coming back to have his balls stepped on–is beyond me. How could they end up in bed after the way she treats him? Kira is like a poison dart toad, which evolved to signal to others to stay away from her.
Near the end of the novel Kira is struck by an epiphany that just seems trite, a duh-moment that everyone else knows to be what-else but obvious:
“She was not cut out to be a hermit. And for the first time it was occurring to her that she didn’t actually need to do everything alone in order to be a self-sufficient, independent person. She could have friends. She could find people she liked here in this weird town.”
Isn’t that sweet? Yet wholly unbelievable. You’ll have to suspend belief at cruising altitude to get through this novel.